Colonies, Nations, and Diasporas in Literature, 1900-1940: African and Caribbean literatures
This class explores how material processes and ideas of empire, nation, and anti-colonialism inform and structure imaginative literature and thought from the Caribbean and continental Africa during the 'Age of Empire'. This is an upper-division class, designed for English majors, and it assumes that students already have familiarity with techniques for analysing and discussing literature. This class adopts an active learning, student-centered approach, in which students commit to generating questions, ideas, understanding and insight, through independent reflection, and dialogue with one another, facilitated by the instructor. The course may use small group discussion, large group discussion, student presentation, and instructor lecture. There is a strong emphasis on close reading of literary texts.
Primary books (on order at U. Bookstore):
Una Marson: Selected Poems
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN: 9781845231682
Thomas Mofolo, Chaka (1925)
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 9781478607151
Please acquire your own paper copies of these novels. You will be expected to make notes inside the books.
Required Poetry: Nontsizi Mgqwetho (South Africa) (pdfs and Word docs uploaded to Canvas)
Required Theoretical/Contextual/Political essays: Amy Jacques Garvey (Jamaica/US), Frantz Fanon (Martinique/Algeria), Joseph Chamberlain (UK), The Negro Worker (International) (pdfs and Word docs uploaded to Canvas)
Course Goals and Objectives.
- You are able to critically explore the issues covered in the course.
- You are able to perform competent close readings of literary texts.
- You use writing opportunities as a space to develop sound metacognitive practices and to critically reflect on your reading and learning practices through writing.
- You develop an awareness of literature’s ability to mediate social, political and economic issues.
- You practice assessing your own and your peers' work in relation to our specific writing criteria.
- You contribute to the development of a class community of learners and thinkers.
Course Policies
- Please submit all your assignments to Canvas, in Word or pdf
- Please set your account to receive notifications from Canvas for this class, and check regularly
- This course info and materials are found in Canvas “Syllabus” (set as homepage), “Files”, and “Announcements” (NOT in Canvas “Modules”); please customize your reading habits accordingly
- Please acquire a notebook in which you handwrite notes on your reading, in-class writing activities, and keep a regular log of your class experiences and responses to those experiences. You may be asked to show me this notebook.
Course Assignments will probably include text-merge; 4-Column Notebooks; meta-cognitive reflections; in-class writing; mid-term paper; peer review; final paper; growth statement, and may include other activities yet to be determined (that may include presentations and conferences).
Class Community Norms
Respect for Difference & Learning: For us to achieve the intellectual vibrancy diversity produces, we have to be open to learning how others see and move through the world, and we have to respect everyone's experiences. We should also recognize that some people's ways of seeing and experiencing the world have been privileged, while others have been marginalized, disparaged, and sometimes met with outright violence. We should attend to that in our written and oral commentary by engaging difference with openness to learning and awareness of power dynamics. I expect each of us to help build a class community so that all members of our class can be welcomed.
Expectations:
1) actively participating in class discussions, small group work and conferences;
2) providing timely, thoughtful, and engaged written feedback on peers’ drafts;
3) completing informal writing assignments on time; and
4) submitting all drafts and revisions of the major essays on the date they are due.
My Role: I will help you develop your writing, hone your critical reading skills, develop nascent ideas, analyze others’ arguments, and pursue your own arguments in conversation with your classmates, primary documents, and professional/scholarly texts.
Your Role: to grapple with the ideas in lectures and readings and in your peers’ writing and conversation. You should puzzle through the texts we read, not skim them; consistently demonstrate engaged, critical intelligence in your writing; and come to class and conferences fully prepared. You will need to reflect on your own writing and learning processes, and your peers’ writing, critically, and engage in revision of your own thinking and writing.
Assessment: In this course you will be assessed by a system of evaluation called “contract grading.” In a nutshell, that means I specify what you have to do to earn a particular course grade, and you decide what you’re willing and able to do and then sign up for the contract that works best for you. There are no surprises: if you fulfill the obligations of your contract, you get the grade you signed up for. Why a grade contract approach? Here are some expert views:
I have found that conventional grading often leads my students to think more about grades than about writing; to worry more about pleasing me or psyching me out than about figuring out what you really want to say or how you want to say it; to be reluctant to take risks with your writing. Grading even makes some students feel they are working against me. Therefore I am using a contract system for grading in this course. –Writing Studies Scholar Peter Elbow
The advantage of contract grading is that you, the student, decide how much work you wish to do this semester; if you complete that work on time and satisfactorily, you will receive the grade for which you contracted. This means planning ahead, thinking about all of your obligations and responsibilities this semester and also determining what grade you want or need in this course. The advantage of contract grading to the professor is no whining, no special pleading, on the student's part. If you complete the work you contracted for, you get the grade. Done. I respect the student who only needs a C, who has other obligations that preclude doing all of the requirements to earn an A in the course, and who contracts for the C and carries out the contract perfectly. (This is another one of those major life skills: taking responsibility for your own workflow.) -- CUNY Professor Cathy Davidson
On Plagiarism, Generative AI, ChatGPT, and other Large Language Models
Plagiarism & A.I.
While I whole-heartedly agree that great writers “steal” from the work of others, this really means influence and inspiration. They do NOT do this word for word, line for line. If I find that you have been using another writer’s (including another student writer’s) words without attribution, we will need to have a serious chat and you run the risk of failing this class. This includes using A.I., ChatGPT, or other large language models. You may use the spell and check
in your word processing program, but not stand-alone sites like Grammarly.
Please do not use A.I. in any form in this class, at any stage of the writing, reading, commenting, or revising process. There is no university-wide policy on this issue, and you may find other professors approaching this in a different way. This is the rule for my class. I will not be using an “AI checker” (I hear such things are pretty useless anyway), but if you do use a large language model, you will be missing out on the entire purpose of taking a writing class.
Here’s why:
- Carrying out every step of the writing process from brainstorming to copy-editing helps you figure out what you think and what you truly mean to say—and I believe this is true for ALL types of writing (academic papers, grocery lists, emails to future bosses, texts to your friends, thank you cards to your grandparents, etc,). Farming this out to a computational model robs you of your own agency.
- Using this technology may not save you time. Some studies have shown that students may spend as much time revising and adapting work generated by large language models as they would have responding to the assignment on their own.
- Using this technology may make things easier—but that’s not the point of writing! Only by going through the entire writing process from daydreaming to brainstorming to drafting to revising and daydreaming again can you figure out what you really want to create and convey. Short-stopping that process robs you of learning and of the satisfaction of success. I believe this is true for ANY writing assignment, not just the ones in my class.
- Using this technology is a form of theft—or at least plagiarism. This technology has been trained using other writers’ works, many not in the public domain and most without the writer’s permission. When you use this technology, you participate in this process.
- Using this technology feeds and supports a billion dollar industry. By using it, you are, in fact, helping to train future generations of AI—without receiving compensation of any kind. The Author’s Guild, the Writer’s Guild of America, and SAG-AFTRA all see this as an important labor issue. Hollywood strikes during 2023 were, in part, about this issue.
- This technology uses a lot of electricity and other resources. It is not a “free gift of nature.”
- For now at least, this technology is biased and error-prone. While this may be more relevant if you are attempting an accurate historical novel than if you are working on a space opera set in a world of your own invention, it’s still worth noting.
- Even if using A.I. is easier and faster, I put it to you that speed and ease are not the purpose of art or art creation. For example, take a look at this behind-the scenes video showing how Gandalf was made to look larger than the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings movies, although all the actors were generally the same size. It's a tale of human ingenuity, hands-on construction, collaboration, and even fun. Then take a look at this video of Ian McKellen 's reaction to having to use green screen technology while filming the Hobbit movies.
Resources
Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art , Ted Chiang
Why Human Writing is Worth Defending in the Age of ChatGPT , Naomi S. Baron
More than 10,000 Authors Sign Authors Guild Letter
A.I. Licensing for Authors: Who Owns the Rights and What's a Fair Split? The Authors Guild
Generative A.I. Can't Cite Its Sources: How Will OpenAI Keep Its Promises to Media Companies? Matteo Wong
OpenAi is a billion-dollar company. Writers deserve more for their contribution to its success , Diya Sabharwal
The Endgame for A.I. is Clear: Rip Off Everyone , Lincoln Michel
AI in the Arts is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can’t Go Quietly , Justine Bateman
Humans are Biased. Generative AI Is Even Worse , Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass for Bloomberg Technology
AI tools show biases in ranking job applicants’ names according to perceived race and gender, Stefan Milne (UW News)
AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change , Dara Kerr
Links to various writings by Professor Emily Bender , UW Professor of Linguistics and Director of the UW Computational Linguistics Laboratory